The Quest for a Good Education

A GOOD education prepares children to cope successfully with life in today’s society. It equips them with academic skills, including the ability to read and write well and to do arithmetic. Moreover, it affects their interaction with others and fortifies wholesome standards of morality.

Because these are critical times, though, such an education is very difficult to provide. A veteran Australian schoolteacher lamented: “Classes are made up of children prone to violence, who use foul, abusive language; children exhausted from lack of sleep as a result of TV viewing; children malnourished or hungry; and children reared without discipline.” And teachers will tell you: “Unruly children are impossible to teach.”

Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, described the dilemma of teachers: “They have got to do drug and alcohol education, sex education, . . . student self-​esteem exercises, gang member detection, . . . and a whole bunch of other things. Everything but real teaching. . . . What they’re really asked to do is be social workers, moms, dads, therapists, cops, nutritionists, public health workers, medical technicians.”

Why is this required of teachers? A summary of the makeup of classrooms in one large city in the northeastern United States indicates why. The New York Times reported statements by one expert concerning an average class of 23 students. He said that “8 to 15 were likely to be living in poverty; 3 to have been born to mothers on drugs; 15 to live with single parents.”

Clearly, the family is in the process of disintegration. In the United States, nearly 1 of every 3 births is illegitimate, and 1 in every 2 marriages ends in divorce. Yet the percentage of out-​of-​wedlock births in Denmark, France, Great Britain, and Sweden is even higher. What efforts are being made to cope with the crisis that this situation creates in the schools?

Seeking Solutions

Various experimental or alternative schools have been set up. These are usually smaller​—making possible closer supervision—​and many develop their own curricula in an effort to meet the needs of children better. In New York City, 48 such smaller schools have opened since 1993, and 50 more are being planned. “It is [school] violence that set off the experiment,” The New York Times noted. By 1992 more than 500 alternative schools had been started in Russia, with over 333,000 students.

On the other hand, The Toronto Star reported: “Thousands are shipping their children off to exclusive private schools.” In the Canadian province of Ontario alone, almost 75,000 children go to private schools. These are now also found throughout Russia, and the magazine China Today says that they have sprung up in China “like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.” The Handbook of Private Schools provides free listings for nearly 1,700 of such schools in the United States, where the annual tuition can be $20,000 or more.

Still other parents have opted for teaching their children at home. In the United States alone, it is estimated that the home-​schooling ranks swelled from about 15,000 in 1970 to as many as one million in 1995.

Different Results

Not all school systems throughout the world are realizing comparable results. In July 1993, Shanker told a group of U.S. educators: “Other countries are running schools and they are getting results that are substantially better than ours.” To illustrate, he told about meeting a couple from Russia who had moved to the United States. He related: “They said that even though they had their kid in a very good private school, their eighth-​grade youngster was learning what she had learned in the third grade back home.”

The former Soviet Union developed a school system that taught nearly all of its people to read and write. On the other hand, according to a U.S. Department of Education estimate, 27 million Americans can’t decipher a street sign or the number on a bus. And Australia’s Canberra Times reported that “up to 25 per cent of primary school children were going on to high school without being able to read and write.”

The crisis in schools now exists to some extent almost everywhere. The 1994 book Education and Society in the New Russia says that “72.6 percent of Soviet teachers interviewed agreed that the school system was in a severe crisis.” According to Tanya, a veteran teacher in Moscow, a major factor for the crisis is that “parents and students themselves no longer esteem education.” She noted, for example, that “a teacher earns half as much as a typical bus driver​—or even less.”

A Good Education Vital

As human society becomes ever more complex, a good education takes on greater importance. In many places the amount of schooling needed to enable a young adult to get employment that will support him and a future family has become higher. Therefore, those who have mastered basic academic skills will have far better job opportunities. Employers are particularly concerned with the bottom line​—how well the job applicant can do the work.

The manager of a job service office observed regarding many high school graduates: “They haven’t been taught to work.” He added: “In dealing with young people the problem that employers tell me about constantly is that they can’t read or write very well. They can’t fill out a job application.”

Parents will surely want a good education for their children, and young ones will wisely want one for themselves. But it is important that they use the keys needed. What are these keys, and how can they be used?

[Blurb on page 6]

In Russia, “a teacher earns half as much as a typical bus driver”